Archbishop Denies Schism: CEN 7.31.09 p 1.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has delivered a sounding rebuke to the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, stating its decision to ignore the wishes of the wider Anglican Communion and proceed with the development of rites for the blessing of same-sex unions and the ordination of gay clergy was theologically uninformed, ecclesiologically incoherent and risked dividing the Anglican Communion.

In his strongest and least ambiguous statement on homosexuality since his address to the 2005 Global South Anglican meeting in Egypt, Dr. Rowan Williams dismissed arguments that appeals to justice or civil liberties should influence the question of gay bishops and blessings, while also reaffirming traditionalist stance on human sexuality. The adoption of resolutions D025 and C056 by the Anaheim meeting of General Convention had not created a de facto schism, he said, but made it increasingly likely that the future of Anglicanism was a two-tier communion of covenanting and non-covenanting provinces.

A spokesman for Lambeth Palace told The Church of England Newspaper Dr. Williams’ July 27 statement entitled “Communion, Covenant and our Anglican Future” was a “reflection” on the actions of the 76th General Convention.

Dr. Williams opened his reflection with a word of thanks for the Episcopal Church’s hospitality and affirmed there was no place in the church of any kind of bigotry towards homosexuals. He also acknowledged that he had heard Presiding Bishop Katharine Jeffert Schori’s assurances the votes did not have the “automatic effect of overturning the requested moratoria” on gay bishops and blessings, “if the wording is studied carefully.”

It was unlikely, however, the wider communion would find Bishop Jeffert Schori’s protestations convincing and would be “unlikely to allay anxieties” the Episcopal Church had chosen to walk apart.

Assuming a didactic tone, Dr. Williams said there were “two points which I believe need to be reiterated and thought through further” by the Episcopal Church.

The Episcopal Church had not done its homework by providing a convincing theological rationale for the adoption of same-sex blessings. Nor had it engaged in the “painstaking biblical exegesis” necessary to justify such an change and had failed to seek a “wide acceptance of the results within the Communion” of its work so far, he said.

Changing liturgies changes doctrine, he argued, and such fundamental changes in Christian anthropology “naturally needs a strong level of consensus and solid theological grounding,” Dr. Williams said—and that had not occurred.

Gay blessings were outside the bounds, he said, as a “blessing for a same-sex union cannot have the authority of the Church Catholic, or even of the Communion as a whole.”

Dr. Williams upped the stakes by noting that it was improper for any member of the clergy—bishop or priest—to be “living in a sexual relationship outside the marriage bond,” Archbishop Williams said. The homosexual or unchaste heterosexual “chosen lifestyle is not one that the Church’s teaching sanctions, and thus it is hard to see how they can act in the necessarily representative role that the ordained ministry, especially the episcopate, requires,” he said.

By permitting gay clergy and same-sex blessings without first “including in its discernment the judgment of the wider Church” the Episcopal Church risked “becoming unrecognizable to other local churches,” and the decision to repeal the moratoria led to an Anglican Communion based upon a “loose federation of local bodies with a cultural history in common, rather than a theologically coherent ‘community of Christian communities’,” he said.

An Anglican Covenant that provided structures of “mutual recognizability, mutual consultation and some shared processes of decision-making,” was a way forward, Dr. Williams said, but acknowledged that some within the Episcopal Church would “not choose this way of intensifying relationships.”

He welcomed dioceses to sign on to the Anglican Covenant in the event their national provinces declined, but said it was too soon to say that a schism had occurred. “It would be a mistake to act or speak now as if those decisions had already been made,” he noted.

The Anglican way historically had been able to juggle “diverse convictions more or less within a unified structure,” he said. While he was not yet willing to say that this period in the life of the church had ended, it may “turn out to need serious rethinking” of what it means to be a catholic church, Dr. Williams said.